Lower East Side Has Less to Offer Jesuits Who Teach the Poor

Nativity Mission Center on the Lower East Side, a Jesuit middle school that serves the poor, is moving because the neighborhood now has fewer poor students.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

The view from 204 Forsyth Street has gone from dilapidated to deluxe. Five stories above the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, the Rev. Jack Podsiadlo leaned over the rooftop cornice of this narrow, red-brick tenement and counted all the boutiques and nightspots that have moved in.

“It used to be you could see drug deals in the park and hookers with johns,” he said. “Now it’s high-rises, hotels and more construction cranes.”

These are not auspicious signs for Father Podsiadlo, the president of the Nativity Mission Center, a Jesuit middle school that for nearly 40 years has been educating promising, but poor, boys in the Forsyth Street building. As fewer Latino families are able to afford the area where they once lived in cramped slums, the school, too, has come to feel out of place.

So, following in the tradition of intrepid Jesuit missionaries who explored far-off lands, the priest has embarked on an urban expedition: finding a needy neighborhood where he can relocate his school by 2012.

A week after sending their latest graduates off to high schools like Fordham Prep and Xavier, Father Podsiadlo and his assistant ventured up to the South Bronx to scout out a new neighborhood. Armed with citywide reports on poverty and education — and their keen sense of need, honed over decades teaching the poor — they walked along busy commercial strips, ducked into cool, quiet churches and chatted with residents lounging on stoops.

Where others might have seen only poverty, they saw possibility. “We serve the poor,” said Father Podsiadlo, who has worked at the Lower East Side school since 1973. “If they’re not here, then we’ll move to where they are.”

The mission in search of its mission is not unheard of. The Little Brothers of the Gospel, a religious order that once served the same area, moved out to Bushwick, Brooklyn, for similar reasons in 1996.

And the move may not be a bad idea for the Nativity center. With donations from its Wall Street bonus-check benefactors down by more than a third since 2008, the school needs new partnerships to save money and increase space. More than a third of its 55 students already commute to Manhattan from other boroughs.

But it is still a bittersweet moment. From these cramped quarters, Nativity has inspired more than 60 other such religious schools nationwide — a movement that continues to grow.

Photo

Rev. Jack Podsiadlo, president of the the Nativity Mission Center with a 7th grade student, Alex Junior Coss.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

When the Jesuits bought the building in the 1940s, the area was becoming a destination for thousands of Puerto Ricans in a huge postwar migration. Men found work as janitors, women as sewing machine operators, settling with their extended families into tenements that had previously housed Jewish and Italian immigrants.

A small group of nuns were running a nursery school in the building, which had become a settlement house of sorts. Father Podsiadlo remembers hearing how they would sometimes try to minister to families who had joined a Protestant congregation.

“The tenants used to throw dirty mop water on them to keep the nuns out,” he said. “It was not a time of ecumenism.”

By the 1960s, the Rev. Walter Janer, a Puerto Rican-born Jesuit, was reaching out to local youngsters, setting up study halls and recreation, and opening a summer camp upstate. But any strides the campers made in self-confidence or academic skills often faded when they returned to New York public schools in September.

“We saw how much they had changed over the summer,” Father Podsiadlo said. “The idea was to see how many of our kids we could prepare for admission to Jesuit high schools.”

The school opened in 1971 with a simple model. Relying on priests, volunteers and young teachers, it welcomed youngsters whose parents could not afford parochial school tuition. Teachers were always present, throughout the school day and during evening study hall. They still are.

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“This is about taking ownership,” said Daniel Perez, a 1998 graduate who now teaches Spanish there and monitors the progress of graduates in high school. “Opportunities come and go, and you have to be aware of them when they come your way. And when they do, you have to go full force.”

For years, the neighborhood was rough and tumble. Father Podsiadlo recalls having to wear gloves in the fall to clear the playground across the street for recess — piles of autumn leaves sometimes hid the needles that had been dropped by addicts. The prostitutes who plied their trade in the park would proposition visitors in the school’s doorway.

The school thrived, sending many graduates to schools like Xavier and Regis. And those personal transformations were mirrored by the neighborhood’s — surprising visitors who remembered the area when the school opened.

“In my mind, the neighborhood was still in the 1960s,” said Glenn Pellino, Father Podsiadlo’s assistant, who had grown up in Brooklyn but spent much of his career elsewhere before coming to Nativity in 2008. “And when I got off the subway, the first thing I saw was a Whole Foods.”

Photo

Inside the school.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

This year, after years of dwindling enrollment from the neighborhood and under financial pressures that could have closed the school, its board voted to move.

Father Podsiadlo and Mr. Pellino began to zero in on neighborhoods in the South Bronx and Brooklyn where conditions echo those of the old Lower East Side. Ideally, they want a spot where there is an active community group or a vibrant parish, a place where parents and neighbors can join their mission.

Several weeks ago, the two men headed to Mott Haven, one of the Bronx neighborhoods that fit their bill. Student achievement is low, and poverty is high. Several church-based community groups operate in the area. Along the bustling storefronts of 138th Street, the two men brightened at the view.

“This is fantastic!” Father Podsiadlo said. “There’s public housing, and look at those bodegas. It’s alive. There’re two subway stations on the street, and that’s important, too. These kids have got to be able to get to high school from here.”

Although there is a recently shuttered parochial school nearby, the men are more interested in exploring new partnerships with an existing school. They were especially intrigued by St. Luke’s School, where they bumped into Msgr. Gerald Ryan, the parish’s longtime pastor.

“This neighborhood used to be all Irish,” Monsignor Ryan told them. “Now it’s just me and the firemen across the street.”

One model Father Podsiadlo is considering is based on a partnership pioneered in St. Louis, where a Nativity middle school moved into an established parochial school. The Nativity school — which assumed responsibility for running grades six through eight — acquired more space, while the parochial school was able to redirect money to its lower grades.

The more Father Podsiadlo walked around Mott Haven, the more he saw to like. He marveled at how the sun drenched the neighborhood. The parks, he mused, could be used for environmental lessons.

“These parks are more beautiful than the ones in Manhattan,” he said, passing by St. Mary’s Park. “Look at all I’ve missed being in Manhattan for so long.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 11, 2010, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Lower East Side Has Less to Offer Jesuits Who Teach the Poor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe